Rumble Fighter: review

The words ‘MMO’ and ‘free’ often tread very lightly around each other, as if in a Mexican stand off that will last longer than the queues at Threshers on a Friday night.

Whilst Rumble Fighter is technically free, if you want to get anywhere without taking a long and mind numbing route that puts the Lord of the Rings trilogy to shame, you’re going to need to chip in with the industry’s new friend, microtransactions.

There are two currencies in the game; the one that you buy and the one that you earn, with each allowing you to buy different in game items such as clothes and things that actually help you whilst fighting.

Names have been pixelated so we don't remember who beat us

The items that have the most impact are the ExoCores which transform your character slightly, giving you access to two whole new special moves. There are also Sacred Scrolls which can be equipped to teach your character new martial arts which affects your default fighting style.

The major disappointment with Rumble Fighter is how basic it all feels. The fighting aspect of this MMO brawler is very simplistic, restricted to block, kick and punch, with some very limited combo options. There are four different classes available with slightly tweaked stats making them better up close, at range, when transformed or for hit and runs, but nothing too in-depth.

It feels like what Powerstone on the Dreamcast might have been if it was a browser based game you got free access to on the back of a cereal box. The 3D movement around arenas is nice, but the actual fighting bits are nothing that hasn’t already been done in Flash based games.

Being a massively multiplayer online game, the majority of brawls take place against other players, up to eight of them at once, in a few game modes that vary slightly to the vanilla ‘beat seven shades of snot out of your opponent’s lifeless corpse’.

Battle mode is your general free for all fist fest which comes in team and last man standing flavours, whereas Rumble mode has a few more game type options. These include king of the hill, potion mode (where you run around like a demented lab rat drinking suspicious looking potion vials), and a group battle mode similar to Super Mario Bros. where you must try and stay ahead of the screen as it slowly devours stragglers.

Some transformations are more extreme than others

Even with the gameplay variety however, the simplistic controls make each mode feel almost identical, except sometimes you end up blocking, punching or kicking whilst defending one point or whilst trying to drink a potion.

Speaking of controls, for a PC based game it is not very keyboard friendly. The attack buttons are laid in a nice little row yes, but unfortunately due to the nature of keyboards, they are surrounded by other identical feeling nice little rows.

Thankfully, gamepads and joysticks are supported by the game, but they are not something we had the opportunity to test. By our futile attempts at keyboarding to victory though, we recommend you give other control options a try if you start to struggle.

Rumble Fighter is a very basic online fighter which will dissatisfy if you are expecting anything else. Unless you are willing to pump money in to this you will find yourself without many options when it comes to fighting against others who did commit their wallets. If you enjoy simple fighting games, then you may want to give this one a look; otherwise we suggest you move along, because it isn’t in the same league as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Soul Calibur. It’s a different sport.

2/5

Written by Anthony H

Anthony has been playing games for far too much of his life, starting with the MS-DOS classic Mario is Missing. Since then his tastes have evolved to include just about anything, but his soft spot lies with shooters and the odd strategy game. Anthony will inspire you with his prose, uplift you with his wit and lie to you in his biography.